Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN!
Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2016.

Pages

Friday, March 28, 2008

Traffic for Genealogy Social Network Sites

Here are the Reach (unique visitors each day per million Internet users) and Page View (daily views per million Internet users) statistics charts from http://www.alexa.com/ for five of the genealogy social networking web sites over the last three years -

Since the graphs are somewhat hard to read, I will list the average Reach (per Million Internet users) and page views (per user) for the last three months for all of the sites listed in my Social Networking post yesterday (plus Ancestry's statistics for comparison purposes) -

The charts are always interesting, aren't they? You can see that Geni made a big splash in early 2007 when they started up. MyHeritage made a splash with their face recognition in 2006, and their traffic increased significantly until the last 6 months. FamilyLink started small without a splash and is slowly gaining traffic. MyFamily and GenesReunited have steadily lost Reach similar to other long-lived genealogy web sites.

The site that surprised me was http://WeRelate.com . I thought that this site would take off because of the Wiki feature. But it hasn't - there is not even enough traffic to show up on the graph.

My observation is that each of these social networking sites are very well done in a creative sense - they look great, have wonderful capabilities, and should appeal to users. However, many of them have very limited Reach. If the purpose of these sites is for researchers to find data and to really share data, then there are way too many of them. Practically, researchers will post their information to either the most popular sites or the ones with the most data on them.

3 comments:

This is Gilad, the CEO of MyHeritage. Thanks for the interesting article. For the sake of accuracy, I'd like to point out that at the period in time where the MyHeritage.com graph seems to point down (Aug 2007), we've started launching more domains and diverting our non-English traffic to them (example: www.myheritage.es for our Spanish speaking users, www.myheritage.fr for French, etc). If you add up the 18 local domains we've launched in the last 7 months, to MyHeritage.com, you will find that overall traffic to MyHeritage in terms of reach and page views is growing non-stop since 2005 and is significantly superior to all the other social networks you've listed, put together. Aha, the devil is in the details!

Thanks Randy for this wonderful write-up. As we can see, brand management is going to be a lot more dependent on social media from now on. More than half of paying customers already have Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Search This Blog with Google

Follow by Email

Subscribe To

About Me

I am a native San Diegan, a graduate of San Diego State University, a retired aerospace engineer, a genealogist and a family guy.
My wife (Angel Linda) and I have two lovely daughters, and four darling grandchildren. We love to visit them and have them visit us.
Angel Linda and I love to travel to visit friends and relatives, to sightsee, to cruise or to do genealogy. Our travels have taken us all over the USA, to England, Down Under and Scandinavia.
For earlier posts (not visible on the main post list), please see the Archives listed below by month.
If you like my blog, please put it in your Favorites or Bookmarks and visit regularly.
Contact me via email at randy.seaver@gmail.com